Читать книгу The Art in Ancient Egypt - Perrot Georges - Страница 10

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In this sketch of our plan, we have reserved no place for the art which is called prehistoric, the art of the caverns and the lake dwellings. This omission may surprise some of our readers, and we therefore beg to submit for their consideration the reasons which, after grave reflection, have induced us to refrain from retracing the first steps of human industry, from describing the first manifestations of the plastic instinct of mankind.

We are actuated by neither indifference nor disdain. We fully appreciate the importance of such researches, and of the results to which they have led. No sooner had it entered into the mind of man to look for and collect the humble remains upon which so many centuries had looked with indifference, than they were found almost everywhere, thickly dispersed near the surface of the earth, heaped among the bones of deer in the grottoes for which men and animals had once contended, buried in peat marshes and sandy shores, sometimes even sprinkled upon the surface of the fields and country roads. Pieces of flint, bone, or horn, fashioned into instruments of the chase, into fishhooks, and domestic utensils; shells, perforated teeth, amber balls which were once strung upon necklaces and bracelets; fragments of rough tissue and of skin garments; seeds and carbonized fruits; earthen vessels made by hand and dried in the sun or simply in the open air. In some of the cave dwellings, bones and pieces of horn have been found upon which the figures of animals are carved with a truth and spirit which allow their species to be at once and certainly recognized.

But none of these remains bear the slightest trace of a system of signs for the transmission of ideas or recollections; there is nothing which suggests writing; and, more significant still, there is a complete absence of metal. All this is evidence that the remains in question belong to a very remote antiquity, to a period much nearer the primitive barbarism than to the civilization of Egypt and Chaldæa, to say nothing of that of Greece and Rome. The comparative method, which has done so much for natural science, has also taken these remains in hand, has attempted to classify them and to gain from them some notion of the life led by the early human families which manufactured them. These arms, tools, and instruments which have been recovered from the soil of the old and cultivated nations of Europe, have been carefully compared with similar objects still in use by the savage races which people the far corners of the world. These comparisons have enabled us to decide the former use of each of the objects discovered. By collating the observations of the various travellers who have visited the savage races in question, we have been enabled to form for ourselves a probably truthful picture, so far as it goes, of the life and social habits of those primitive Europeans who made use of similar tools and weapons. And that is not all. The general character of those early periods being established, further examination brought to light the local differences which prevailed then as now. Thus the proneness to plastic imitation seems to have been peculiar to a few tribes—although traces of this taste are found elsewhere, it is nowhere so marked as among those primitive cave-dwellers of Perigord whom Christy and Edouard Lartet have so patiently studied.

By dint of careful classification and comparison, we have been enabled to follow the march of progress through those countless centuries whose number will never be known to us, whose total would, perhaps, oppress our imaginations if we knew it; we have been enabled to discover the slow steps by which mankind raised itself from the earliest, almost shapeless, flint axe, found with the bones of the mammoth in the quaternary alluvial deposits, to the rich and varied equipment of "lacustrian civilization," as it has sometimes been called. In this unlimited field, of which one side at least must ever be lost in unfathomable obscurity, the main divisions have been traced; the stone age has been defined and divided into the palæolithic and neolithic epochs; the age of bronze followed, and then came the iron age. With the appearance of the former metal the tribes of northern and central Europe established a connection with the civilized races which surrounded the Mediterranean, and with iron we are in the full classic period.

We can never be too grateful for the persevering labours of those who have carried on these researches in every corner of Europe; their deserts are all the greater from the fact that they could never count upon those agreeable surprises which come now and then to reward excavators on the sites of ancient and historic cities. Their chances are small of finding those objects of art which, by their beauty and elegance, repay any amount of toil and expense. The remains which they bring to light have little to say to our æsthetic perceptions; they repeat a few types with an extreme monotony; but, on the other hand, they carry our thoughts back to a point far nearer the cradle of our race than the myths of early history or even the monumental remains of Egypt and Chaldæa. They cast some slight illumination upon those distant ages of which humanity has preserved no recollection. They people with unknown multitudes those remote epochs into which scientific curiosity had, but yesterday, no desire to penetrate. There can be in all this no real question of chronology, but when from the sands of Abbeville or the caverns of Perigord we dig up the first flint implements or those fragments of bone, of ivory, of reindeer horn, which have preserved to us the first attempts made by man to copy the outlines of living beings, it takes us far beyond those days of which our only knowledge comes from vague tradition, and still farther beyond those centuries which saw the first struggling dawn of history.

We have, then, decided not to embark upon these questions of prehistoric art, because, as the title which we have chosen declares, we propose to write a history, and the word history, when the human race is in question, implies established relations between certain groups of facts and certain portions of time, measured at least with something approaching to probable truth.

We do not yet possess, probably we shall never possess, any means of estimating even within five or six thousand years, the actual duration of the stone age. From all analogies progress must have been, in the beginning, exceedingly slow; like that of a falling body, the rapidity of industrial progress is continually accelerating. This acceleration is not of course quite regular; the phenomena of social life are too complex, the forces at work are too numerous and sometimes too contrary to allow us to express it by the mathematical formula which may be applied to movement in the physical world; but on the whole this law of constantly accelerated progress holds good, as indeed may be historically proved. So long as man had to do without metals, each generation, in all probability, added but little to the discoveries of that which preceded it; most likely after each happy effort many generations succeeded one another without any further attempt to advance. Ever since they have been under our observation, the savage races of the world have been practically stationary except where European commerce has profoundly modified the conditions of their lives. It is probable, therefore, that more centuries rolled away between the first chipped flints and the well polished weapons which succeeded them than between the latter and the earliest use of bronze. But we cannot prove that it was so, nor satisfy those whom probability and a specious hypothesis will not content. Where neither written evidence nor oral tradition exist there can be little question of historic order. The remains of the stone age are not calculated to dissipate the silence which enshrouds those centuries. In the art of a civilized people we find their successive modes of feeling and thought interpreted by expressive forms; we may even attempt under all reserve to sketch their history with the sole aid of their plastic remains. The chances of error would of course be numerous; but yet if all other materials had, unhappily, failed us, the attempt would have been well worth making. The more ancient portions of our prehistoric collections do not offer the same opportunities; they are too simple and too little varied. The primitive savage who moulded matter to his will with great and painful difficulty, could impress upon it nothing but those gross instincts which are common to man and beast; we can discover nothing from his works, beyond the means which he employed in his struggles with his enemies, and in his never-ending effort to procure food for himself.

The word history cannot then be pronounced in connection with these remote periods, nor can their remains be looked upon in any sense as works of art. Art commences for us with man's first attempts to impress upon matter some form which should be the expression of a sentiment or of an idea. The want of skill shown in these attempts is beside the question; the mere desire on the part of the workman renders him an artist. The most hideous and disgusting of those idols in stone or terra-cotta which are found in the islands of the Greek Archipelago, at Mycenæ and in Bœotia, idols which represent, as we believe, the great goddess mother whose worship the Phœnicians taught to the Greeks, are works of art; but we are unable to give that title to the axes and arrowheads, the harpoons and fish-hooks, the knives, the pins, the needles, the crowds of various utensils which we see in the glass cases of a pre-historic museum; all this, interesting though it be to those who wish to study the history of labour, is nothing but an industry, and a rudimentary industry, which is content with supplying the simplest wants. It is not until we reach the sculptures of the cave-dwellings that we find the first germs of artistic effort, and in truth, man did not cut the figures of animals upon the handles of his tools and upon those objects which have been called, perhaps a little recklessly, batons of command, for any utilitarian purpose; it was to give himself pleasure, it was because he found true æsthetic enjoyment in copying and interpreting living nature. Art was born, we may acknowledge, with those first attempts at the representation of life, and it might fairly be expected that our history should commence with them, were it not that they offer no sequence, no starting point for any continuous movement like that which, beginning in Egypt and Chaldæa, was prosecuted in Greece and led in time to such high developments; even its competent students confess that the art of the cave-men was an isolated episode without fruition or consequence. Specimens of this art are found at but a few points of the vast surface over which the vestiges of primitive man are spread, and neither in the neolithic age, nor even in that of bronze—both far in advance in other ways of that of the cave-dwellings—does it ever seem to have entered into the mind of man to copy the types offered to him by the organic world, still less those of mankind, which, however, had long before been roughly figured in one or two caves in the Dordogne.[30]

Towards the close of the prehistoric age the taste for ornament becomes very marked, but that ornament is always of the kind which we call geometric. Hardly a single decorative motive is taken from the vegetable world. Like the rude efforts of the cave-men, this decoration proves that those by whom it was imagined and who frequently employed it with such happy results, were not contented with bare utility, but, so far as they could, sought after beauty. A secret instinct worked in them and inspired them with the desire to give some appearance of elegance to the objects which they had in daily use. This geometrical style of decoration prevailed all over central Europe until, in the first place, the movements of commerce with Greece and Etruria, and secondly the Roman conquest, introduced the methods of classic art.

From what we have said, it will be seen that we could not have passed over in silence this system of ornamentation; but we shall again find it in our path when we come to treat of that prehistoric Greece which preceded by perhaps two or three centuries the Greece of Homer. By the help of the discoveries which have been lately made in the Troad, at Mycenæ, and in other ancient sites, we shall study the works produced by the ancestors of the Greeks before they went to school to the nations of the East. But even with the discoveries which carry us farthest back, we only reach the end of the period in question, when maritime commerce had already brought to the islands and the mainland of Greece objects of Egyptian, Phœnician or Chaldaic manufacture, but before those objects were sufficiently numerous or the relations with those countries sufficiently intimate to produce any great effect upon the habits of native workmen. Among the deposits to which we have alluded, it is generally possible to distinguish those works which are of foreign origin; and such works excluded, it is easy to form a sufficiently accurate general idea of the art practised by the forefathers of the historic Greeks—by the Pelasgians, to use a conventional term. So long as it was left to its own inspiration, Pelasgic art did not differ, in its general characteristics, from that of the various peoples spread over the continent of Europe, and still practised for centuries after the dawn of Greek civilization in the great plains to the north of the Alps and the Danube. Its guiding spirit and its motives are similar. There is the same richness, or rather the same poverty, the same combinations produced by a small number of never-changing linear elements. One would say that from the shores of the great ocean and the Baltic to those of the Mediterranean, all the workmen laboured for the same masters. Struck by this resemblance, or rather uniformity, one of the most eminent of German archæologists, Herr Conze, has proposed that this kind of ornament shall be called Indo-European; he sees, in the universality of the system, a feature common to all branches of the Aryan race, a special characteristic which may serve to distinguish it from the Semites.

Objections have been brought against this doctrine of which Herr Conze himself has recognized the gravity; by numerous examples taken from the art of nations which do not belong to the Aryan family, it has been shown that, human nature being the same everywhere, all those peoples whose development has been normal, neither interrupted nor accelerated by external causes, have, at some period of their lives, turned to the style in question for the decoration of their weapons, of their earthenware, their furniture, their apparel and their personal ornaments. The less richly endowed among them would have stopped at that point but for the example of their neighbours, who stirred them on to new attempts and further progress; others advanced without impulse from other sources than their own instincts, they reproduced vegetable and animal forms, and finally the human figure in all its beauty and nobility. It was the same with letters. Among the nations which have made a name in history how few there are that possess a true literature, a poetry at once inspired and critical! All however, under one form or another, have a popular poetry which is more or less varied and expressive.

The trace of this earliest spontaneous effort, of this first naïve product of the imagination, never entirely disappears in a literature which is life-like and sincere; it is found even in the most perfect works of its classic period. In the same way the most advanced and refined forms of art draw a part of their motives and effects from geometrical decoration. This style therefore should be studied both for its principle and for the resources of which it disposes, but as we shall have to notice it when we treat of Greece, it seems to us better to adjourn till then any discussion of its merits. Both in Greece and Italy approximate dates can be given to the monuments which it ornaments, they can be placed in their proper historical position, which is by no means the case with the objects gleaned throughout central Europe.

There is another consideration of still greater importance; the artistic remains of Greece form an almost unbroken series, from the humble and timid attempts of nascent sculpture to the brilliant masterpieces of Phidias and Polycletus, and show the steps by which the artist succeeds in passing from one style to another, from curves and interlacing lines, from all mere abstract combinations, to the imitation of nature, to the representation of bodies which breathe, feel, and speak, which move and struggle. Elsewhere force has either been wanting for this development, or evidence of the transition has escaped our researches. Nothing can be much more imperfect or more conventional than the figures which we find upon some of the painted vases from Mycenæ and Cyprus,[31] upon which the workman's hand, accustomed to straight lines and circles, or segments of circles, has succeeded in suggesting by those means the figures of birds and fighting men. Nothing could be farther from the subtlety and variety of the contours presented by living organisms. But in spite of all this, art was born with the awakening of this desire to reproduce the beauty and mobility of living forms. All that had preceded it was but the vague murmuring of a wish which had not yet become self conscious; but, at last the intellect divined the use to which it might be put, and guessed at the part which might be played by the plastic instincts with which it felt itself endowed. All the rest depended upon natural gifts, upon time and circumstance; the march along the road of progress began, and although its rapidity was intermittent, it was certain to arrive, if not always at the production of masterpieces of divine beauty, at least at sufficient competence in painting and modelling to transmit the types of a race and the images of its gods to posterity.

The student of plastic art finds in the remains of prehistoric times rather a tendency to the creation of art, than art itself; by postponing our study of this tendency until we come to investigate the origin of Greek and Italian art, we are enabled to avoid all excursion beyond the limits implied by our title, beyond that which is generally called antiquity. The conventional meaning of this word embraces neither the primitive savages who chipped the first flint, nor the cave-men, but it calls up before our eyes the brilliant cities of northern Africa and hither-Asia, of Greece and Italy, with which our school-days have made us familiar; it reminds us of those nations whose stories we learnt from the sacred and profane authors whose works we read in our youth; and our thoughts revert to their grandiose monuments of architecture and sculpture, to their masterpieces of poetry and eloquence, to those great works of literature in which we took our first lessons in the art of writing and speaking. Behind all these images and associations the intelligence of an educated man tells him—and the discoveries of science every day make the fact more certain—that in the ancient as in the modern world, the nations which figure upon the stage of history were not isolated; they each had neighbours who influenced them, or whom they influenced, by commerce or conquest; each also received something from its predecessors, and in turn transmitted the results of its labour to those which came after it; in a word, the work of civilization was continuous and universal. The nations which, for three or four thousand years, were grouped round the basin of the Mediterranean, belonged to one historical system; to those who take a wide grasp of facts they are but the members and organs of one great body, in which the nervous centres, the sources of life, of movement and of thought, slowly gravitated with the effluxion of time from the east to the west, from Memphis and Babylon to Athens and Rome.

As for the populations which, long before the opening of this period and during the whole of its duration, lived on the north of the Danube, the Alps, and the Pyrenees, they do not belong to the same system; they were attached to it by the Roman conquest, but at a very late period; not long, indeed, before the triumph of Christianity, the invasion of the barbarians, and the fall of the empire, led to the dissolution of the antique system and the substitution for it, after centuries of confusion and violence, of the wider and more comprehensive civilization of modern Europe, a civilization which was destined to cross every sea and to spread itself over the whole surface of the globe. As soon as the victories of the Roman legions, and the construction of the great roads which united Rome with her most distant provinces, had brought them into constant communication with the maritime cities of the Mediterranean, these barbaric nations, who had neither history, nor letters, nor expressive art, received them from their conquerors, whose very language they all, or nearly all, adopted; and for all this they gave practically nothing in return. Elsewhere, the old world had almost finished its task. It had exhausted every form in which those ideas and beliefs could be clothed which it had kept unchanged, or little changed, for millenium after millenium. The old world employed such force and vitality as remained to it in giving birth to the new, to that religion which has led to the foundation of our modern social and political systems. These also were to have their modes of expression, rich and sonorous enough, but dominated by analysis; they were to have arts and literatures, which have given expression to far more complex ideas than those of antiquity. The Celts and Teutons, the Slavs and Scandinavians, all those tribes which the Romans called barbarous, have, in spite of the apparent poverty of their share, made an important contribution to the civilization into which they plunged at so late a period, when they did so much to provide a foundation for those modes of thought and feeling which are only to be found in modern society.

These races do not belong, then, to what we call antiquity. They are separated from it by many things; they have no history, they have neither literary and scientific culture nor anything that deserves the name of art. Hidden behind a thick curtain of mountains and forests, sprinkled over vast regions where no towns existed, they remained in their isolation for thousands of years, furnishing to civilization nothing but a few rough materials which they themselves knew not how to use; they took no part in the work which, throughout those ages, was being prosecuted in the great basin of the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean, in that accumulation of inventions and creations which, fixed and preserved by writing and realized by art, form the common patrimony of the most civilized portion of the human species. When, at a late hour, these nations entered upon the scene, it was as disturbers and destroyers—and although they helped to found modern society, they produced none of those elements left to us by antiquity and preserved for us by that Rome in whose hands the heritage of Greece was concentrated.